Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Google Adwords Strategies And Tips

Google AdWords Strategies & Tips contains the techniques, information and secrets for building a highly-effective campaign that minimizes your costs. Increase your click through rates (CTR), keep your costs reasonable and outsmart your competitors by taking advantage of the tips and strategies that we have learned by running AdWords campaigns for many of our clients.

A cost effective way to advertise has great flexibility on the part of the advertiser, he/she can make it running in minutes and can change ads whenever feels doing it after tracking the response of the visitors and the conversion rate. However testing keywords and ads to improve the conversion rate is a never ending process and one has to be very selective and alert in choosing the right ‘keywords’. You can be running an ad campaign at Google in minutes! Well to make your ad word campaign successful and worth spending I present some keen facts and suggestions to be considered while developing ad word advertisements.

You should be very specific while choosing your keywords in the ads because being general in advertisements will bring traffic to your site but not many actual buyers in other words the conversion rate will be very less or your return on investment will be less.

Target the right audience by selecting the language and countries that you want to target. For example, I exclude all countries where English is not understood by a large percentage of the population.

Always link to correct pages for example if you are advertising a particular product then link to the page in particular that is selling that product and not to the site’s homepage. User will never like much browsing and will ultimately leave for your competitor if isn’t able to find the desired information. So link to particular pages.

Track The Return-On-Investment Of Each Ad oogle tracks the click through ratio of each ad. But it doesn't track the conversion ratio.

Use a special tracking link in each ad to track its conversion ratio. For example, you could attach each ad with an affiliate tracking system link. Make sure each ad produces a return-on-investment. Offer the benefits that your product will give the consumer because many times users are looking for those benefits and will be induced to your site. For example learn free, earn at home, become an expert, lose weight etc. Try to include such benefits in the ads and see the results soar.

Include Targeted Keywords In Your Ad Include the targeted keywords in the headline and the description of the ad. Google will highlight searched keywords in bold in the ad.

Record the return on investment of each ad to keep your expenses in your pre decided budget and update or change low ROT ads simultaneously. ROI is the base for which you are planning ads and it should not be under looked. Google offers the stats free for the ad words, hence you can use it and calculate the ROI and act accordingly.

Google Strategies:
  • Significantly improve the position of ads in your Google AdWords Select campaign
  • Pay less by finding clever, inexpensive new keywords to use
  • Save hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars on your overall AdWords campaigns
  • Maximize your CTR Click Through Rate for your AdWords Select campaign
  • Ensure that you don't get penalized by Google for ineffective, poorly-performing initial ads (this could affect your ranking for future AdWords placements for months or even years!)
  • Calculate the ROI for your campaign (using the included Microsoft Excel ROI calculator spreadsheet)
  • Determine what your optimal daily spend should be for your campaign
  • Optimize your keyword selection through a variety of techniques Remove common words, such as "a, an, in, on, it, of, etc."
  • Remove every word that does not absolutely need to be in the ad.
  • Make every word count
Remember that advertising is a never-ending series of tests. Always track your ads. Never stop testing different keywords and ads to improve your conversion ratio and lower your customer acquisition cost.

Source: http://brokencodes.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-adwords-strategies-and-tips.html

AdWords Quality Score

Along with max cost per click, Google AdWords employs a “quality score” to determine where ads will rank for certain keyphrases. The quality score factors in click-through rates, ad quality, and landing page quality with respect to the keyphrases being bid on. This system has serious flaws. It is common for ads that have little or no history that are circulating for very specific keyphrases not to show because of a low quality score. This means some of the most relevant ads won’t show for specific queries because they haven’t had a chance to establish a history to demonstrate their quality. Automating the analysis of ad text and landing pages leaves a large margin of error that AdWords doesn’t compensate for. Worse yet, the system often assigns higher quality scores to ads that are not relevant. This is more common in cases of geographically targeted keyphrases. Sites that have ads circulating for specific cities might have ads circulating for products and services they don’t offer because their landing pages are specific to the location being searched. For instance, a real estate site for Pleasantville, New York, might have a high enough quality score to have ads circulating for search terms such as “pleasantville new york daycare.” Even though they are obviously not relevant to daycare services.

Setting higher max CPCs can offset low quality scores, but for specific terms that may have only a few ads circulating, the max CPC might be well over a dollar and still not show. The max CPC should be closer to ten cents for keyphrases like this.

The Problem

AdWords treats terms that are broad matched the same as terms that are exact matched. This means that if a query broad matches a term being bid on it is treated on the same level as a query that matches exactly the term being bid on (Either term could be bid on as a broad match. The distinction here is how the query in fact matches the term being bid on, not the matching set for the term). This is not a good way to have the most relevant ads showing. If an advertiser takes the time to bid on a term, it is likely that their site is more relevant to the term than a site that is broad matching the term. This is because people can’t possibly think of every variation that their ad might show for when they broad match a term.

AdWords should start treating these types of matches differently. Not only would it improve the relevance of their ads, it would give small advertisers more of an advantage in AdWords. Claims about the benefits of the “long tail” in PPC advertising would actually have some support.

Source: http://purevisibility.blogspot.com/2006/10/adwords-quality-score.html

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